this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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My mental model of the right-left dichotomy:
Anything more complex and the labels hit their limits.
I don't know. I mean, it's pretty easy to find uncontroversially evil people on the left as well. Jim Jones had some pioneering takes on racial harmony, and did not get along with the right of his day. Or cynical people on the left - ask Lemmy about if climate change is going to kill all humans in the next few decades.
The term itself comes from the French revolution, with the revolutionaries sitting on the left. Since then, you've had ship of Theseus things happen where a classical liberal might end up on the right, because they follow a chain of intellectual forerunners tracing back to someone opposing the French revolution. In other cases some kind of analogy is made, like the Japanese wartime government being right-wing because many of the dynamics were shared with the European right of the day. Or how Cato the Elder was "conservative" because he promoted a traditional way of life, even if that tradition was being bi and not reading.
All in all, left and right might be great names, because they're directions that always exist, but depend completely on where you're standing.
Good exposition of the problem.
I think a better one is acceptance of change.
Sometimes change is good, sometimes the world is not ready. I think this aligns closely with "cynical" and "naΓ―ve" but just makes it more abstract.
The trouble being that this possibly makes the Nazis left wing, which nobody contemporary saw them as.
In school this was taught to me as reactionary-conservative-progressive-radical and contrasted with left vs. right.